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How and why are analogies spontaneously generated? Despite the prominence of analogy in learning and reasoning, there is little research on whether and how analogy is spontaneously generated in everyday settings. Here we fill this gap by gathering parents&#39; answers to children&#39;s real questions, and examining analogy use in parental explanations. Study 1 found that parents used analogy spontaneously in their explanations, despite no prompt nor mention of analogy in the instruction. Study 2 found that these analogical explanations were rated highly by parents, schoolteachers, and university students alike. In Study 3, six-year-olds also rated good analogical explanations highly, but unlike their parents, did not rate them higher than causal, non-analogical explanations. We discuss what makes an analogy a good explanation, and how theories from both explanation and analogy research explain one’s motivation for spontaneously generating analogies.

CogSci 2022

Analogy Use in Parental Explanation

How and why are analogies spontaneously generated? Despite the prominence of analogy in learning and reasoning, there is little research on whether and how analogy is spontaneously generated in everyday settings. Here we fill this gap by gathering parents' answers to children's real questions, and examining analogy use in parental explanations. Study 1 found that parents used analogy spontaneously in their explanations, despite no prompt nor mention of analogy in the instruction. Study 2 found that these analogical explanations were rated highly by parents, schoolteachers, and university students alike. In Study 3, six-year-olds also rated good analogical explanations highly, but unlike their parents, did not rate them higher than causal, non-analogical explanations. We discuss what makes an analogy a good explanation, and how theories from both explanation and analogy research explain one’s motivation for spontaneously generating analogies.

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The 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society highlighted research on the theme Cognitive Diversity in addition to the full breadth and diversity of research topics offered by the society’s membership. 





Causal learning is shaped by people’s prior beliefs, including their expectations. In this paper, we specifically examine expectations of determinism: do they vary with perceptual features of physical causal events, and how do they influence subsequent causal learning from data? We show that perceptual features lead adults to different expectations of determinism for different causes of launching (Exps. 1A & 1B). Those expectations lead to significant differences in responses to causal “failures”; that is, we show a difference in violation-of-expectation effect after a failed launch (Exp. 2). Actual data can reduce or eliminate the impact of these expectations, but they do not override the effect of perceptual features (Exp. 3). Overall, spatiotemporal contiguity cues and expectation of determinism have similar effects on causal learning outcomes, but neither is fully reducible to the other.

Expectations of Causal Determinism in Causal Learning

The present paper reports an experiment (N=254) testing two views of how reasoners learn and generalize potentially complex causal knowledge. Previous work has focused on reasoners’ ability to learn rules describing how pre-defined candidate causes combine, potentially interactively, to produce an outcome in a domain. This empirical-function learning view predicts that reasoners would generalize an acquired combination rule based on similarity to stimuli they experienced in the domain. An alternative causal-invariance view goes beyond empirical learning: it allows for the possibility that one’s current representation may not yield useable (i.e., invariant) causal knowledge –– knowledge that holds true when applied. Accordingly, because useable causal knowledge is the evident aspiration of causal induction, this view posits that deviation from causal invariance is a criterion for knowledge revision. The criterion shapes the empirical functions learned and retained. A discriminating test is whether reasoners would re-represent interacting causes as a whole cause that does not interact with other causes, even when in their relevant experience all (pre-defined) causes in the domain interact. Our results favor the causal-invariance view.

Causal invariance guides inference of empirical integration rules

The paper aims to examine participants’ open-text ‘think aloud’ explanations of their reasoning while making a judgement about an ambiguous scenario. It aims to consider this data in light of frameworks such as causal modelling, intuitive theories, coherence and the story model. Consistent with these frameworks, we find that participants bring in a large amount of world knowledge to connect ambiguous evidence to unobserved, inferred variables and, via these, to the target judgement. We attempt to represent these chains of inferences using causal diagrams and find that participants interpretations of the scenario can be lumped into one of two distinct causal models, each presenting an internally coherent ‘image’ of the ambiguous scenario. Furthermore, participants’ judgement predicts which of those two models they adhere to. We discuss the limitations and merits of this methodological approach for investigating these types of frameworks.

Exploring the Richness of Human Causal Reasoning with Think Aloud Data

Human collaboration often involves a decision to pursue one out of multiple comparable goals, in which case it is challenging to remain committed to the same goal collectively. Philosophical theories as well as empirical evidence from developmental psychology suggest that humans, having shared intentionality as an underlying cognitive structure, may be able to form joint commitment in pursuing a collective goal without communication. By conducting experiments in a real-time cooperative hunting game that heavily relies on visual perception, we demonstrated that humans established and maintained robust cooperation with high-quality hunting, even with a large number of potential targets. Additionally, we showed that a Bayesian imagined “We” (IW) model within a joint commitment framework, could capture humans’ robustness in resisting alternative targets with relatively high quality of hunting. This poses a contrast with a Reward Sharing (RS) model that, despite performing proficiently in pursuing a single goal, mostly exhibited low-quality hunting and whose teaming fell apart as available targets increased. In a hybrid team simulation experiment, the IW model could better mimic the intentions of human hunters compared to the RS model. Together, the success of the persevered group commitment in humans suggests that shared intentionality is a pivotal element in human cooperation. Moreover, the similarity between the performance of humans and the IW model sheds light on the computational formulation of shared intentionality and further advances our understanding of the nature of cooperation.

Exploring an Imagined “We” in Human Collective Hunting: Joint Commitment within Shared Intentionality

Online communities rely on their members to understand and follow community norms, which they learn by observing others and the consequences of their behavior, seeing codes of conduct, and receiving feedback via moderation. Here, to determine the contribution of each source of learning to the preservation of a social norm, we extend cultural consensus theory, a mathematical framework for identifying the cultural consensus in a community. In particular, we extend the model to include learning from experience, centralized moderation, and decentralized moderation, three features commonly found in online communities. We then apply the extended model to data from an online community dedicated to preserving a norm related to the psychophysical scaling of intersubjective notions of beauty derived from facial aesthetics. We find that users' perceptual alignment with the norm before enculturation predicts involvement in the community and that experience in the community is an important indicator for group perceptual learning.

Learning and enforcing a cultural consensus in online communities

How altruistic behavior evolves despite its evolutionary cost is still an intriguing question. Using Neural Network and Gradient descent algorithms, we proposed a mixed computational model of fitness competition among three artificial agents (predator, altruistic prey, recipient prey), in the zero-sum game environment. We found that altruism emerged without direct reciprocity when the predator invested in altruism aiming to use the prey’s altruistic behavior as “bait” to fish for more prey. For the decisive factor of this mechanism, we demonstrated that the long-term decision-making of a predator enhanced its investment in the prey's altruistic behavior, which leads to a significant increase in altruism and fitness in altruistic prey. We interpreted our findings from economic, evolutionary, and psychological perspectives, connecting zero-sum economies, K-selection, and third-party emotional decision-making to the emergence and maintenance of altruistic behavior.

Fishing Free-Riders using Altruism: Zero-Sum Fitness Competition in Prey-Predator System

The current study investigates children’s understanding of the social dynamics of complex groups. We asked children to use relative differences in intragroup status to predict the behaviors of individuals. Specifically, who do children (ages 3 to 10, n = 120) and adults (n = 34) believe a subordinate “worker” would be loyal to (another worker or to their “boss”), and whom the worker would prefer to socialize with? Young children predicted that workers would be loyal to other workers, but as age increased so did children’s tendency to predict that workers would be loyal to bosses. Regardless of age, children and adults believed that workers would prefer to spend time with other workers. These results have important implications for how children understand and navigate nuanced power differentials within a group.

‘An ounce of loyalty’: Children’s expectations about loyalty and preference for in-group members and authority figures

A milestone in cognitive development is understanding numerals to represent the exact number of discrete items in a set (i.e., the cardinal principle). This development has received much attention, but little is known about its relation to understanding numbers as measures of continuous quantity (e.g., “six blocks long” versus “six blocks”). To investigate this, 90 children were asked to complete two tasks: a give-a-number task, to assess cardinality knowledge, and a novel give-a-line task, to assess measurement knowledge. As expected, accuracy was greater on the give-a-number task than the give-a-line task. More unexpectedly, the quality of performance on the give-a-number task was as often negatively associated with quality of performance on the give-a-line task as it was positive correlated. Specifically, when asked to create a line N-blocks long, children who gave only approximately correct answers on the give-a-number task often outperformed children who gave exactly correct answers on the same task. These findings indicate that an approximate—and purportedly less mature—understanding of number possesses the hidden strength of being more flexible and suitable for measuring length.

Children’s Cardinality Knowledge Isn’t Always Beneficial

Dogs have a unique evolutionary relationship with humans and are relied upon in a variety of working roles, yet little is known about the kinds of visual information available to them, as well as how they direct their attention within their environment. The present study, inspired by comparable work in infants, aimed to categorize the visual statistics (specifically the identity of objects) available to dogs during a common event in their daily lives, a walk. Using a head-mounted eye-tracking apparatus that was custom designed for dogs, four dogs walked on a pre-determined route outdoors under naturalistic conditions generating a total of 49,431 frames for analysis. On average, there were few individual differences between dogs. Dogs looked proportionally more to people and plants than to other object categories in their environment, like the sky which they appeared to consider as background. The results of this project provide a foundational step towards understanding how dogs’ look at and interact with their physical world, opening up avenues for future research into how they complete tasks, and learn and make decisions, both independently and with a human social partner.

Categorizing Dogs’ Real World Visual Statistics

Central to rationality is the ability to think about our beliefs, and make sure they are based on good reasons. If we have several conflicting reasons to believe something, we wait for more information before making a decision, perhaps rechecking our original reasons before proceeding. In these studies, we presented great apes and young children with conflicting evidence about the location of a reward. We found that apes double-checked the evidence for their original choice before making a final decision, revealing an awareness of their own beliefs and reasoning not hitherto documented. Young children, in contrast, were more sensitive to peer disagreement than conflicting physical evidence, illustrating the distinctively social nature of human rationality.

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